Official Blurb: While working in Europe, nineteen-year-old Maggie never dreamed that her family would be ripped apart and scattered across the sea, with her young brother and sister sent to Canada as part of the Home Children Migrant Scheme.
Desperation sends Maggie on a search from England to Canada, with a harrowing shipwreck leaving her stranded on Sable Island. Eventually arriving in Halifax, Maggie is devastated to discover the trail to find her sister and brother has gone cold.
An offer of help from industrialist Thaddeus Tharaday seems like an answer to prayer, but is the wealthy Tharaday her benefactor or nemesis?
With the help of a dashing newspaper reporter, Maggie begins to unravel the web of deceit surrounding her siblings' disappearance. However, the closer she gets to the truth, the more dangerous her quest becomes.
With lives on the line and the threat of everything she loves being torn away, can Maggie entrust the scattered pieces of her heart to the one who will never leave?
Set in Victorian-era Nova Scotia, Scattered weaves together elements of mystery, adventure, faith, and romance to take readers on a journey of hope and courage that will resonate with their hearts today.
MY THOUGHTS:
This is a really fun and impressive debut novel.
I'm in awe of the immense research undertaken by the author, who visited the Canadian Maritimes briefly in 2012, and came home certain she could spin a great story out of the sights she'd seen. It's intriguing that the novel is set in the same place and time as Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne series, but by a 21st century Aussie author. (Halifax is one and the same as Kingsport, the University city where Anne, Gilbert and several of their children lived and studied at different times.) As we read, the Halifax of 1882 comes to life right down to landmarks, street names and news articles.
The plot, carefully grounded in history, is one of those desperate quests which absolutely must be fruitful. Failure would be devastating, yet it has the potential to meander off into wild goose chases at any moment. Maggie O'Loughlin is a lovely young woman who has lost track of her younger brother and sister. While she's busy trying to support her family financially away from home, their mother dies and poor Jack and Emily are sent off to Canada as part of the Home Children initiative. Many destitute kids from Britain were sent across the ocean to take up menial roles as domestic servants and farm hands, but in this case, they had a devoted sister who is now doing her utmost to find them. Maggie knows that with each passing day, their trails will grow fainter, and her first obstacle is a shipwreck from which she's the sole survivor. It grounds her for weeks on lonely Sable Island, before anyone can take her to the mainland at all.
Without revealing more of the action, it turns out that some people already in Halifax have good reasons of their own for wishing to prevent Maggie's reunion with her siblings. What follows is some extensive travel across that New Brunswick/Nova Scotia region, while characters unaware of each others' whereabouts make uninformed decisions, dodging people they should be approaching, and vice versa. There are plenty of secrets, making it difficult for characters to figure out who should be trusted, although we readers know, because all scenes are divvied well between heroes and villains.
The 'baddies' are quite the power couple, doing their best to appear awesome with the greatest PR of the day at their disposal, and it's fun looking forward to the form their downfall will take. Of course it involves clues of all the dodgy activities they've had their fingers in. Past actions tend to catch up with people in the most astonishing ways, and it's always good to see how Nola Lorraine uses her extensive research to make this pan out on the page.
For more insight into her inspiration and research, here is a good interview.
Many thanks to the author for supplying me with a review copy.
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